Beyond the Aquila Rift is the fourth title in Short Stops, a series from Conversation Tree Press dedicated to bringing exceptional shorter works of fiction to life through beautifully bound, letterpress-printed, limited editions that begin shipping immediately upon announcement. 

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Illustrated by Matt Murphy and Tim McDonagh

“After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes that will almost always be accepted by the aperture’s own machinery. Furthermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide. In short, you usually get where you want to go.”

In Beyond the Aquila Rift, Alastair Reynolds takes the reader to the outermost limits of human understanding. When a routine faster-than-light jump goes awry, a deep-space transport crew awakens in an unfamiliar part of the galaxy, centuries from home. Awaiting them is a reunion both comforting and impossible, and a truth that lies beyond the limits of perception.

A former space scientist with the European Space Agency, Reynolds is known for his far-future visions and hard science fiction spanning more than twenty novels and a hundred short stories. Here, he threads that scientific realism through a story tinged with psychological unease and cosmic horror, as the crew confronts the shifting boundary between reality and illusion.

Beyond the Aquila Rift was one of two Reynolds stories adapted for Netflix’s acclaimed anthology series Love, Death & Robots.

Edition Information

 

Beyond the Aquila Rift is a limited edition of 500 unnumbered copies, letterpress printed by Nomad Letterpress in England on Magnani Pescia 130gsm mould-made paper, a paper we usually reserve for our Deluxe Editions. It is signed by the author and both artists.

The edition features three pieces of artwork: a frontispiece by Matt Murphy (who we collaborated with on Solaris), an illustration by Tim McDonagh at the end that mirrors the frontispiece, and a third piece by both Matt and Tim. 

It is quarter-bound in book cloth and custom hand-marbled paper from Daniela Prina. The endpapers are GF Smith Colorplan with a linen finish.

The author’s name and title are foil stamped on the spine in the same style as the previous entries in our Short Stops series, ensuring a uniform look across the series.

It measures 6 x 9 inches with 64 pages including front and back matter, making it our highest page-count Short Stops title yet.

As with all of our books, this edition will not be reprinted.

US$135. Copies are in stock and shipping.

Availability

Copies of Beyond the Aquila Rift are now available to collectors who pre-ordered copies of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana that came with publisher’s rights (i.e. Deluxe copies #1-200 and all Lettered copies). An email has been sent with a private link to order and copies will begin shipping today. If you did not receive an email and you believe you should have, please let me know.

The private pre-order period ends at 10am ET on Wednesday October 22nd, at which time remaining copies will become available to the public.

All copies ship from Ontario, Canada. For US collectors, we are only shipping with Canada Post and paying pre-processing fees on our end, so we do not expect any brokerage or other fees to be charged on shipments. However, we have no control over US government policy. Please see here for more information for US collectors specifically. 

For logistical and practical reasons we cannot combine orders for this title. Thank you for your understanding.

Artwork by Matt Murphy and Tim McDonagh

N.B. The discussion and reveal of artwork below includes spoilers.

The artwork for Beyond the Aquila Rift was a close collaboration between Matt Murphy and Tim McDonagh. From the outset, the two artists worked in tandem to explore the story’s intersecting moods of science fiction and horror, each bringing a distinct visual language to the project.

Murphy’s clean, luminous style evokes technological precision and the illusion of control, while McDonagh’s intricate, darker imagery hints at the nightmare lurking beneath.

The first and third illustrations share the same composition, reinterpreted through each artist’s perspective to reflect what Thom perceives in those moments. The second piece was an even greater collaboration—a shared canvas passed back and forth as they layered their styles to suggest the point where the unseen begins to breach Thom’s awareness.

Together, the three images mirror the story’s shifting realities, revealing two sides of the same experience.

Matt Murphy

Matt Murphy is an award-winning, British illustrator based in Dorset, UK. Renowned for his conceptual approach, delicate textures and confident colour palettes, his work is full of mystery and meaning, leaving us wanting to find out more about the characters he depicts. We previously collaborated with Matt on our edition of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris.

Tim McDonagh

UK illustrator Tim McDonagh creates intricate, vibrant worlds inspired by vintage comics, gig posters, and tattoo art. His acclaimed work spans Star Wars books for Egmont, award-winning New York Times Kids covers, and projects for Nike, Apple, and Lucasfilm.

Custom Hand-Marbled Paper by Daniela Prina

The custom hand-marbled paper was created by Daniela Prina of Papiers Prina in Belgium.

It features a palette of cosmic darkness and dreamlike unease: black for the void, metallic blues for distant stars, pale violet for fading memories, red for buried truths, and gold and silver for deceptive light and fractured reality.

Typography

The title is set in Noir Blanc Rouge’s Nemoy typeface, a geometric display font family whose letterforms evoke navigation and overlapping trajectories, a reference to the alien symbols used for the routing syntax that’s key to faster than light travel.

Section breaks are marked by arrow symbols drawn from Nemoy’s glyph set, each capable of pointing in one of eight directions. Their arrangements were randomly generated for every section break, mirroring the crew’s disorienting journey and the chance nature of their destination.

The body text has been set in Mark van Bronkhorst’s MVB Verdigris Pro. 

Printing

The text of the edition was letterpress printed by Pat Randle and Ellen Bills of Nomad Letterpress using their Heidelberg cylinder press. Nomad Letterpress has a long history of printing books and periodicals for a number of fine press publishers along with their own publications. They have also printed a number of our own editions, including our upcoming editions of Ramsey Campbell’s Cold Print & Others and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

About Short Stops

Books in our Short Stops series are a little different from our other editions that come in multiple states. They:

• Are announced and offered for sale when they are completely finished and in hand, with shipping beginning on the same day we begin accepting orders.
  
• Feature shorter works of fiction.
• Have a trim size of 6in by 9in, slightly smaller than our other 6.7in by 9.5in books.
• Have no rights associated with them and do not include a slipcase.
• Always be offered to current Deluxe and Lettered rights-holders first, even though they have no rights attached to them. Rights holders may skip it entirely without losing rights to the next book from the Press, and having a copy of the most recently published book in the Short Stops series does not give any rights to the next in the series.

We have another Short Stops title planned before the end of the year and expect to have a number of them available a steady clip going forward, covering classic and contemporary titles from a wide range of authors.

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is a science fiction writer based in Wales. A former space scientist, he turned from studying pulsars and binary stars to writing fiction. He is the author of twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories. His work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, and Sturgeon Awards, and he has won the Seiun, Sidewise, European Science Fiction Society, and Locus Awards. His stories have also been adapted for stage and television.